Friday, June 18, 2010

Advertisers from the world … disunite!Guess advertising is going from one height to the other. They can kill you for your lack of patience, but they will never make the advertisers impatient. Good or bad, we need advertising, or how else you know about a product (or concept)?

Man likes to brag about something that he makes or owns, and other men fall for it. Sheer jealousy, or being trapped under the act of hard selling.

One would never know.

I understand the way advertisers work overnight to do a promo, and then come out with the target consumer segment to work on their thought process. This is a artistically carved out scientific process (enough to get someone mad!). A noted bank recently targeted the senior citizen customer segment, and in the process, made them look a lot younger.

Looked like they lost the point. Good for people like us, who are on the verge of getting senior soon!

But then, I still don’t understand whether there’s enough data with advertisers for us to really fall for. Having seen the advertising styles from the days of black and white billboards and ad prints, to the chic and glaze of today’s ads, I have hardly been encouraged by this ‘professional bragging’.

A recent case has been a few advertisers who are actively trying to promote some medical products as comments to my blog posts. I deleted a few last week, but they come back.

Let me honestly tell these advertisers: No use pal, please look out for some other place, I am not a great consumer of medicines, neither will I encourage people to use medication.

For me, a great health is the one which stays fit naturally.

The question still remains. Why are we so annoyed at the callers, the TV ad slots and the occasional ad ‘outburst’ that we see on the web pages?

Even though we like to fall for these traps, we also detest them since they always end up being over-hyped, and sometime even feel stupid. Competition in market place is fine, but this random use of selling skills to hype up the product (or concept) is definitely not fool-proof. They just seem to be man’s stupid sense at work, and sometimes we get irritated at the way they are carried out.

Negative publicity is also good, they will still argue.

One would never know, but then there was a time when consumption was definitely not guided by advertisements. The only ‘advertisement’ could be roadside sellers hawking for their goods. Think a few centuries back, business was wholesome. And the cost to advertising was never added as part of the costing for the product (or concept).

Goods could be cheap, in case we spend less on selling them on the internet, media or on roadsides. Our irritation at ads will be on a lesser curve.

Mr. Finance Minister, in this times of extreme price rise, will you just spend a few minutes going through this post of mine?

Some cost can be effectively reduced. I am scared of over-publicity, and so in case there are quite a few men and women like me, we can collectively voice our apprehensions over those who promote hard selling.

This will reduce costs, and can effectively bring down prices, even if marginally.